By: Neil Simmons | Follow me on Twitter / X: @NSimmz
The month of October is famous for many things: colorful foliage, apple picking, pumpkin pie, Halloween, and the start of a new year of Boston Bruins hockey. Keeping with the spirit of the season, why not combine Hockey and Halloween and look back upon a few opposing players who Bruins fans came to fear?
Braden Holtby – Holtby is one of the first names that comes to mind for opposing players who have utterly tortured Bruins fans in recent memory. Right from the jump as a rookie when he made his playoff debut against Boston in 2012, Holtby dominated the Bruins and made the entire fanbase fear the red. His career numbers against Boston are by far his best against any team in the National Hockey League: 18-5-0 with a .940 Save Percentage, 1.98 Goals Against Average, and four shutouts.
It almost became a foregone conclusion that the Bruins would lose if Holtby were in the other net. At one point, Boston lost 14 straight games to the Capitals, including being shutout by Holtby in all three meetings during the 2014-15 season. His dominance that season effectively knocked the Bruins out of the playoffs, as they missed the second wild card by just two points. There was an audible sigh of relief across New England when he left for Vancouver in 2020.
Thomas Vanek – Vanek was a fine top-six forward who led a solid 1,000-game, almost 800-point career with a few 30-goal seasons under his belt. He was a dangerous top-six forward in his prime but hardly ever considered among the league’s elite. But for one reason or another, he was an entirely different beast whenever he played the Bruins. Vanek feasted against Boston; it was seemingly inevitable that he would find his way onto the scoresheet every time he faced the Bruins.
Vanek scored 34 goals and 70 points at a +21 clip in 67 games against Boston, dwarfing his production against any other team in the league. His next closest point total is 47 in just as many games. Since the 2004-05 lockout, only Sidney Crosby (73) has more points against Boston than Vanek. You have to look as far back as 1994-95 for another player to knock Vanek out of at least a tie for the top two. Just for good measure, Vanek added eight points in ten playoff games against the Bruins, split between Buffalo and Montreal.
Guy LaFleur – Realistically speaking, there are a dozen different members of the 1970s-90s Montreal Canadiens that could have every veteran Bruins fan snap awake in a cold sweat, but Guy LaFleur especially has his place in Boston’s Hall of Infamy. Aptly nicknamed Le Démon Blond (per Hockey Reference), LaFleur’s game-tying goal in the infamous “Too Many Men on the Ice” game in the 1979 playoffs still lives on in New England nightmares. That goal is the cherry on top of LaFleur’s 85 career regular season and 26 career playoff points against Boston in an era when Montreal completely dominated the rivalry.
Ken Dryden – Dryden was Holtby’s predecessor as the rookie goaltender who upset a dominant Bruins team and owned them for nearly a decade. If Lafleur was Le Démon up front for the 70’s Canadiens, Ken Dryden was the looming 6’4” sleep paralysis demon in their net. Stepping into the Montreal crease as a rookie in 1971, Dryden backstopped an upset of one of the best Bruins teams of all time and eliminated them three more times before the end of the ‘70s.
Dryden won six Stanley Cups and five Vezina trophies with the Canadiens, putting up goaltending stats that would make him one of the league’s elite today. The worst part, which has almost certainly seared itself into the minds of Bruins fans of the era, is that Dryden was drafted by Boston and later traded to Montreal.
Carter Verhaeghe – Verhaeghe, the most recent entry onto this list, doesn’t elicit the same blood-curdling rage from Bruins fans as his teammates Matthew Tkachuk and Sam Bennett. Instead, his presence on the ice evokes fear and paranoia because he always seems to be in the right spot at the worst possible time. Verhaghe has ten career playoff game-winning goals on his resume, three of which have come against Boston. Seeing him with the puck when the game is on the line will justifiably make you cover your eyes in panic. Nobody needs to be reminded of what Verhaeghe did two seasons ago, which gave a new generation of Bruins fans mental scars akin to LaFleur in ‘79.
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